screening

The person you hire from an agency to take care of your ailing, aging family member — shouldn’t that caregiver have passed a federal background check? Or drug testing? Or be screened for skills and training? Unfortunately, the chances are the agency did none of those things. A troubling new national study finds that nearly half of the agencies that send caregivers to help vulnerable seniors do a poor job of recruiting, screening, testing and training the caregivers they hire. …

If you’re 75 or older, you don’t need routine screening for breast, colorectal and prostate cancer. If you’re a woman age 65 or older, you don’t need to be tested for cervical cancer (the Pap test or Pap smear). These are the current guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force, but a new study finds that many older Americans are being routinely screened for these diseases — something experts say is unnecessary, costly for our health care system, and …